(Flickr picture of the BIZZin3D Meet Up by MrTopf, Creative Commons License)
In case you had anyh doubts, the use of virtual worlds for corporate use is still early stage. That is what representatives of Linden Lab (Second Life), Forterra Systems (OLIVE platform) and Metaversum (Twinity, a German virtual world replicating real world cities) agreed on during the BIZZin3D Meet Up in Berlin (Germany) on Sunday.
The conference featured discussion panels instead of the usual individual Powerpoint-presentations. The event could be attended on the web (streaming video), in Second Life (we could not get the videostream working, which was not a big deal because there was almost no audience in-world) and in Twinity (no idea whether it worked out well there).
On mrtopf.de you can read an excellent live blog of the Immersive Internet panel and there is also a great special report on Maxping by Jules Vos. Panelists were Clare Rees/Linden from Linden Lab, Mirko Caspar from Twinity and Dick Davies from Forterra.
As at MetaMeets in Amsterdam it is obvious that realism prevails in the sector. The hype-like predictions by analysts in 2007 and 2008 are now used as examples of how wrong we can get it. In Berlin references were repeatedly made to other difficult adoptions of new technology.
Remember email in the nineties, when CEO’s demonstrated their total lack of understanding of important changes by “outsourcing” all email activity to their secretaries and assistants. The hilarious discussions about whether corporate websites would be a good idea. Or the migration of classifieds to the web, while newspaper publishers only now try to buy those companies for lots of money and far too late to change the market.
Regarding virtual worlds we are still in the email adoption phase for the corporate business world, so Dick Davies said. “In 5 years maybe we see traction there.”
Of course there is more to say about the adoption of virtual worlds in other contexts than business collaboration. Clare Rees talked about a virtual conference by IBM in Second Life, which was a good experience and saved the company a lot of money (compared to flying people in from all over the world).
Forterra Systems is very active in the serious simulation business, for instance enabling training for emergency workers and the military.
Twinity is focusing on the consumer market and brands. This virtual world is specialized in what Mirko Caspar calls “real virtual” environments. Not only are real cities replicated, the users are encouraged to use their real names and to use web tools for social networking.
Another important topic in Berlin was OpenSim. It is maybe a good idea to underline that Opensim is NOT a Second Life clone. It is a piece of open source software with some abilities around the 3D web. One of the feature sets is to support the Second Life viewer protocol, so people with experience in SL can use Opensim somewhat like SL, as is well explained in various articles on Maxping.
Interesting developments seem to be related with Second Inventory which is used to save Second Life creations to the hard drive. This could be made compatible with realXtend which is a free open source virtual world platform with which you can create your own applications using it as a base (there has also been announced a new realXtend viewer, which is an open source browser for experiencing and navigating virtual worlds).
I am getting strongly interested in these open source developments, but it hard to say how important these tools and platforms will become for mainstream business applications.
My take on this all: we don’t know what the future will bring. It is true that email, corporate website and e-commerce needed some years to take off, but that does not mean automatically that virtual environments will take off in 3 to 5 years, as some participants at the Berlin conference said. It is what they hope what will happen, and I am sure they work hard to make it happen.
One of the issues which were being discussed is how virtual worlds will transform doing business and work in general. There is a famous passage in an IBM report about “one billion one-person enterprises” which will emerge, and many experts speak about ad hoc teams, working on a project, disbanding and the members integrating other teams on other projects.
Such a dispersed and highly flexible environment needs tools for collaboration at a distance, tele-presence etc. The vision of the dispersed workforce and the flexibility is highly probable, but once again, virtual environments are but one possible tool for collaboration.
Maybe video-conferencing will become more affordable (think Skype, Mogulus/Livestream etc), or Twitter-like tools may be integrated in complete packages enabling worldwide collaboration. The tools used for tele-presence at MetaMeets (Amsterdam), at BIZZin3D (Berlin) and at MetaverseU (Stanford) and which actually gave good results were web-based videostreams, web-based chat and Twitter, and these were all three conferences about virtual environments. Don’t forget the mobile dimension: people will want to collaborate using netbooks, iPhones and other smartphones.
The avatarization of collaboration is something many people like (there is discussion about how photo realistic avatars should be, whether to have very creative avatars or dull business-like ones etc), but many others have objections or think it is too game-like. Can we be sure that this latter group will disappear just as the old CEO’s refusing to use email?
Is it because many youngsters now explore virtual kids and teens worlds that the problems will be solved for the next generation? I do know many kids and teens who are not active in such worlds, and others who are but who consider it as games and games only – they often think Second Life is boring. So expect at least that a lot of convincing will need to be done in order to promote the use of 3D avatars on a truly large scale.
This being said, I do believe that virtual worlds have great advantages. They are communities of very innovative people, and for those of us who actually “get” avatarization, it is a way to engage in social networks in a far deeper way than is possible on Facebook or Twitter (at least for contacts with people you meet for the very first time).
Those environments have great value, even if they would stay niche-environments for years to come. I am sure we’ll make great progress integrating web tools for collaboration, which will make the virtual environments ideal for small enterprises or teams. But please, do not underestimate the evangelization efforts which will be needed in order to get mainstream adoption.
Roland Legrand
